Thursday, March 5, 2009

A Masterpiece by Helen Levitt

New York, 1988. Helen Levitt

While my inbox is flooded with images every day, it never bothers me as a picture takes so little time to look at. The only problem is that most of the images rarely stand out or move me. Yesterday, however, this Helen Levitt popped up advertising a new show at the Kahmann Gallery in Amsterdam and it just struck a chord with me.

Levitt, now 95, has been photographing for 70 years and is best known for her black and white street photographs of children at play. Cartier-Bresson was her friend and mentor and like him, she bought a small Leica camera in 1936, which enabled her to move quickly and freely through the streets of New York. Her color work only came to light recently, but like her fellow New York School photographer, Saul Leiter, the color work is a revelation, bringing a wonderful painterly quality to what is otherwise highly photographic work.

There's so much going on in this picture - the children's dilemma, the fabric of the woman's dress, the incidental action outside of the rectangle of the phone booth and the strange way it breaks up the picture, the intersecting lines of color, the abstract texture of the sidewalk, and of course above all the humor of the situation. Now that's a picture!

This may be my favorite photo of all time! Have you been to ICP recently? There is a small print of this picture currently being shown there as part of Vince Aletti's "This Is Not A Fashion Photograph" exhibit.

"If only all blogs were as life-affirming and tender-hearted as that of gallerist James Danziger. Whether his focus falls on the work of an individual artist or a particular theme, The Year in Pictures is compulsive reading."